When I last attended the Nobel Prize ceremony, in 2004, one of the other guests was a multimillionaire philanthropist named Fred Kavli. I had met Kavli a few years earlier, in California, while lecturing at a fundraiser for one of the research centers he endowed. He was in Stockholm to celebrate the awarding of a Nobel Prize to the head of that research center, but he was also there to see how the Nobel ceremony worked. He had decided to endow another big prize for science: the Kavli Prize. He wanted to insure that, when it was awarded in his native Norway, it would be done with as much pomp and ceremony as the Nobel.

The first Kavli prizes were handed out in 2008 and, every two years since then, three Kavli Prizes have been awarded in the fields of astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience; each winner, or team of winners, receives a million dollars. The Kavli Prize, however, is small potatoes compared to the Breakthrough Prize, the largest monetary science prize in the world. Every year, Breakthrough Prizes are awarded in three categories: life sciences, fundamental physics, and math. Each prize is worth $3 million. In November, at the Breakthrough Prize ceremony, in San Francisco, $21.9 million in prize money was awarded. This is three times the amount of money awarded through the Nobel Prizes. (Each year, the Nobel Foundation awards six prizes, at approximately $1.2 million each.) These and other new, big-money science prizes are impressive. But are they necessary or useful?

Money isn’t all that separates the Breakthrough Prize from the Nobel, which has a long and distinguished history. Alfred Nobel endowed the prize in 1895. He died the next year, and the first prizes were awarded five years later, in 1901. The winners are chosen through a carefully administered, year-long, multi-stage adjudication process, with a clearly defined set of requirements. This process is one of the reasons the Nobel Prizes have gained such stature: the care that is given to the selection of winners is reflected in the confidence that journalists and the public have in the prize.

The same can’t be said for the Breakthrough Prizes, which are an extension of an award called the Fundamental Physics Prize, which was created out of the blue, in 2012, by a Russian Internet entrepreneur, billionaire, and former physics graduate student named Yuri Milner. That year, Milner awarded nine Fundamental Physics Prizes, each worth $3 million, to an eclectic group of theoretical physicists—mostly string theorists—many of whom were located at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton. There were no stated criteria for the awards: some awardees received prizes because of their accomplishments, while others received it because of their originality, intelligence, or promise. Without any specific criteria, the choice of awardees and fields was open to interpretation. Still, it was clear that string theory figured strongly—and, since past laureates help choose future winners, it is not surprising that this has remained the case.

Milner’s supersized prize proved irresistible to a number of billionaire power couples. Sergey Brin (of Google) and his then-spouse, Anne Wojcicki (of 23andMe); Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan; and Jack Ma (of Alibaba), and his wife, Cathy Zhang, joined the party and broadened the prize to include life sciences and mathematics. They also decided to televise the prize ceremony and have Hollywood celebrities announce the awards. Seth MacFarlane was the host of the ceremony, which was aired this past November on the National Geographic Channel; guest presenters included Russell Crowe and Hilary Swank. (Pharrell Williams performed his song “Freedom,” as well as a rap about science: “To me / science is the continuous journey / to understanding / all that is.”) Some smaller prizes were awarded, too. Five “New Horizons” prizes, each worth a hundred thousand dollars, were given to younger scientists, and Ryan Chester, a high-school senior from Ohio, won a $250,000 scholarship for a video he made explaining Einstein’s theory of special relativity.

The idea behind the Breakthrough Prize seems to be that money and celebrities will make science sexier, and that this, in turn, will entice more talented young people to go into it. Is this really sensible, though? Does someone go through a decade of advanced education and a lifetime of hard work in the hopes that they might win a science lottery and get to shake Russell Crowe’s hand? Meanwhile, although any mid-career scientist would be happy to win such a prize, I suspect that every single winner of the Breakthrough Prize would happily return the money in exchange for a Nobel Prize. The Breakthrough Prize, like the Kavli Prize and the other million-dollar-plus awards being given out around the world, will always be considered a consolation prize.

I happen to know many of the winners of these various prizes personally; a number are close friends. I respect them all as scientists. I couldn’t be happier that their financial situations have improved—and I wouldn’t turn down the money if it were offered to me, either. The fact is, though, that if we want to help the fields in which these prizes are awarded, then a new prize is the last thing we need.

One problem is the narrowness of the fields in which the prizes are awarded. Some of the prizes are restricted by subfield: the Kavli Prize, for instance, gives awards in just one sub-specialty of physics (astrophysics). It’s sometimes hard to come up with good candidates for the Nobel Prize when one includes all of the researchers working in all of physics. When you restrict the field further, you risk running out of appropriate candidates after a few decades. The worst prize in this regard, to my mind, is the Templeton Prize, which, at 1.2 million pounds, was, until the advent of the Breakthrough Prize, the largest such prize in the world. It is not strictly a science prize, but rather a religious one: Sir John Templeton, the investment guru who founded it, believed that science could be a route to God. Although some awards have gone to spiritual leaders—recent winners have included Jean Vanier, Desmond Tutu, and the Dalai Llama—the prize has also been given to well-known scientists, such as Nobel Laureate Charles Townes, or Astronomer Royal Lord Martin Rees, not to honor their science, but to commemorate the impact of their work on religion, no matter how facile. One gets the sense that, whenever the committee can find a distinguished enough scientist who is sympathetic to religion—a kind of subfield unto itself—they make an award, in order to give the Templeton Prize some much-needed scientific credibility.

But a larger problem is that these prizes are not an efficient use of funds. Instead of funding science prizes, these billionaires should try funding the science itself. Take particle physics—one of the main specialties in which Breakthrough Prizes have been awarded. In that field, government funding has been cut back significantly, and budgets have been flat or declining for years. The $27 million awarded by Yuri Milner, in 2012, would have funded perhaps two hundred and seventy new postdoctoral fellowships that year, or a smaller number of postdoctoral fellowships combined with endowed faculty positions. That could more than double the current number of young researchers in the field. With a larger group of young, talented, and ambitious scientists finding gainful employment, the likelihood of jumpstarting some new and exciting research would be significant. (The benefit to young scientists, meanwhile, would be far greater than that created by giving more money to older scientists whose work has, in all likelihood, already been recognized and well supported.)

Implicit in the notion that prize money will motivate scientists is the idea that insufficient motivation is an obstacle to discovery: if only scientists wanted it more, they would join the field and make breakthroughs. But that’s not how science works. Recognition is a factor, but much of that comes from the standard rewards within academia. The indispensable factor is substantial, well-funded institutional support. That support can come from private industry—Bell Labs produced many Nobel laureates—or from governments. But both sources have been drying up. Private institutes like Bell Labs don’t exist anymore, and government support for fundamental research has largely remained static or decreased over the past decade**.**

Why don’t we see more billionaires using their money to support young people who are just entering their fields? For one thing, the glory reflecting on the prize-givers wouldn’t be as great as the glory they derive from associating themselves, sometimes onstage, with big-name scientists and Hollywood celebrities. Call me jaded, but I can’t help thinking that, ultimately, these prizes do more to glorify the wealth and beneficence of the prize-givers than to promote the well-being and popularity of science itself. (Self-aggrandizement is not an issue for the people who award the Nobel Prize. For one thing, Alfred Nobel established his prizes posthumously.)

Science, in short, already has enough big prizes. My advice to would-be billionaire prize-makers is simple: set up independent foundations from which good young people and the institutions they are part of can receive support. This will allow more scientists to pursue careers that might otherwise be cut short due to the current, and unfortunate, lack of public funding. If you want glitz, spend your money on yachts; if you want to have an immediate impact as a force for good, then help the poor. But if you want to help the scientific enterprise, prizes aren’t the way to do it.

Lawrence M. Krauss is the director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University. He is chair of the board of sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and is on the board of the Federation of American Scientists.